Thesis
Title: Voices of outrage: online partisan media, user-generated news commentary, and the contested boundaries of American conservatism during the 2016 US presidential election (2021). Read here.
Supervisors: Dr Nick Anstead and Professor Nick Couldry
Biography and Research
Dr Anthony Kelly is a Government of Ireland Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin (UCD).
Anthony holds a PhD in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), awarded in 2021. His doctoral research, supported by a National University of Ireland (NUI) Travelling Studentship in Media and Communications, presented an examination of the discursive dimensions of affective polarisation in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. Through a focus on expressions of entitlement to dictate the partisan content of media, this research demonstrated how audiences can position their engagement with participatory media as a consumer act with political and economic significance.
Anthony’s postdoctoral research, funded by Research Ireland, moves beyond this prior work to theorise how the notion of audience antagonism resonates with scholarly treatments of digital labour, influencer media, and platform power. It builds on a comprehensive consideration of the existing literature on polarisation and partisanship, whilst integrating an engagement with emerging work on the nature and limits of platform power, the prevalence of forms of “dark” participation in online media, and the wider impacts of so-called “toxic” fan practices in social media spaces.
Prior to commencing his PhD, Anthony was an Assistant Lecturer in Anthropology at Maynooth University, where he designed and delivered seminar-based modules in digital anthropology, political media, and globalisation. More recently, he served as Digital Anthropologist at L’Atelier BNP Paribas, where he directed research on the social and cultural implications of emerging technologies. Anthony is currently a member of the UCD Centre for Digital Policy and Media Literacy Ireland. He is also a recent recipient of an NUI Grant for Early Career Academics.